Meet the former refugee who cooks for hundreds of hungry kids each week

Growing up in the ruthless Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Cindy Chen was no stranger to hunger. But she didn’t expect to see so much of it in Australia.

Source: Insight

Watch the full episode, Hungry, on SBS On Demand.

Cindy was five years old when Pol Pot took hold of her country. Her family fled, and moved between different refugee camps for years.

“As a child … I’ve got no breakfast, I couldn’t go to school, and it’s because of this communist war that we couldn’t do all that,” she recalls.

Cindy was sponsored to live in New Zealand when she was 18. She came to Australia in 1994, working as a translator for embassies and raising three children. To get out of the house and meet other parents, she started volunteering at her son’s primary school in south-western Sydney, making breakfast for children in the morning.

Having left behind the communist regime that left much of her country starving to death, Cindy was surprised when students at her son’s primary school told her they were going hungry, too.

“Some kids come to me and tell me that ... ‘I’m coming here with no food in the stomach, and we cannot concentrate,’” Cindy says.

“I said ‘why? Didn’t you have parents or someone to cook before you come to school?’” But Cindy found that many of the children at the school are also migrants and refugees, who might have come to Australia without their parents, or have parents and guardians that start work too early to make breakfast for their kids.

Cindy decided to start bringing in food and cooking in the morning to make sure every child had enough to eat before school. She became close with the other volunteers, many of whom had similar childhoods and experiences to hers. The program now feeds up to 500 kids, two mornings a week.

While many of the students who come along aren’t experiencing food insecurity and might have had breakfast at home already, Cindy says many students would go hungry without the meals prepared by the team of volunteers.

She adds that the multicultural community at the school gives parents  the opportunity to learn about different ingredients and styles of cooking from each other, and the breakfast program helps the kids learn to socialise and share. 

“It affects a lot for the kids. I can see they are more happy,” she says.